713 Accounting Firms Said To Use THIS TECH [”It cost us $1.5M in writeoffs”]

Today on the podcast, I'm peeling back the curtain on some information about tech selection choices that a whole bunch of accounting firms have shared with me. We've got this tool up that basically says, what practice management system have you switched to in the last few years? Thousands of firms have now gone through that tool and given me a bunch of information about switches they made and whether they would recommend you do the same. There's some really interesting insights in this data that could save you making a big Expensive, bad decision. Also today, got a, a really good question about AI changing compliance. Like all accounting firms, even if you're a bookkeeping firm, we all do some types of compliance, or at the very least are influenced by sort of what compliance looks like for our clients. We're gonna talk about some interesting ways that AI is changing, like how the laws are made and what compliance will look like and what that means for accounting firms. Also today, Some advice on how to find a better client. Getting over our own pricing hesitation. Intuit signs a new deal with Anthropic, the folks behind Claude. Gang, so much to cover today. Let's get into it. Just dawning on me, the expression, let's get into it. Really kind of a rallying cry for this podcast, right? Down with Intuit. Let's get into it. Okay. If you're new here, welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast where we talk all things accounting firms. Just had to explain to a guy yesterday what I do, what my job is. He said, are you in tech? I said, nope. I said, I'm an accountant. And he didn't say anything. I said, any follow-up questions? Because that's usually where the conversation goes to die. But then I explained that I make like thought leadership stuff for accounting firms and he laughed. Oh, did he get a kick out of that? My life's work. That's, that's specifically, that's what he's laughing at. Okay, we asked 713 accounting professionals to tell us what practice management systems they use, and importantly, what system they used before that as well. We actually got thousands of submissions. Today, I've pared it back to just these 713, basically whose identities we could verify, like these are legit accounting firms. This is not a vendor-sponsored survey. This is data that we went out and collected ourselves over the last 18 months. There's some really, really interesting insights in this data. We're gonna go through my favorite 8 today, tidbits that the team and I picked out that we think could save you from making the wrong decision. I've shared before how I picked the wrong practice management system once, cost us like at least 18 months of productivity and over $100,000. Your practice management system, after all, in your accounting firm, it's the most expensive, most important software that you choose. It's like the operating system, the brain. And there's so many of them, almost 50 options for US firms right now. Though these days I only have 4 systems in my leader category. In my app recommendations for accounting firms. So if you ever want to learn about a tool, what does Jason think about it? Go check out my app recommendations. Pretty much any tool in the space, you can kind of get my inside scoop on there. Okay, first thing that firms wanted people to know, things they wish they had done differently. Number 1, this was the most common thing that people brought up: don't trust the sales demo. And you're like, I know this, obviously salespeople are commissioned, like the incentives there are messy, But that doesn't stop you from, in the context of the demo, getting sucked in and you're like, oh yeah, this is pretty cool. And you kind of just take for granted the things that they say and show and don't realize oftentimes just how conflated these demos are. A few things people actually said to this end: don't listen to the salespeople who work for the software companies, and especially don't trust what they say about integrations. Another person said they had $1.5 million in write-offs after a lack of planning and overpromises from the salesman. Evidently this was issues in the migration of their billing stuff from one system to another. Don't believe all the hype. All software platforms mean well, but they are not all things to all people. Salespeople have an invested interest to themselves more than their clients. There's so much more than what the salespeople tell you. This was a shop that was going to TaxDome. They said with TaxDome, you have to invest a lot of money and time just to get to kind of the basic level of what you need to run your firm. Getting sold on features that don't work the way they're supposed to. See them in action first. This is probably my favorite one. Read reviews from other accounting professionals that own their own firms or work in similarly sized firms. Salespeople oversell. Never buy potential, only buy features that are currently available. That's, that is great advice. My take here, buddy, your peers are the best source of information. Like, if not the salesperson, where am I gonna get that information, right? Like, I bought a lot of software just based on what the sales rep told me. The vastly better way to approach this is through a network, other real users who have used these things. Maybe they went through a similar transition a couple years before. Man, that can shave years off your life. Second insight that came out of this, of these 700 folks, 61 mentioned that implementation is a pain or will take longer than you think. That almost 10% of people just said plan more for implementation. I'm a big advocate of pulling in an external, like third-party implementer, especially if you're rolling out a practice management system. Somebody who has set up this PM in other people's firms will shave so much time and strain off the process of setting it up for yourself. These systems are so complex that I think pulling in an expert, you get to like a good setup in year 1 that may have otherwise taken like 3 years for you to get to on your own. And I like, I'm a tinkerer, like I want to understand it myself. Like I can totally understand the notion of wanting to know it in and out, but having the perspective of somebody else who has seen the same transition in a bunch of other firms, that is invaluable. Also, if you're doing this with a team, if you don't want to be the bad guy, like it is pulling teeth to get a bunch of accountants to go to a different system, right? Oftentimes having this third party who can be the bad guy and, and sort of distribute some of that strain, that can be a really valuable way to leverage an implementer as well. Conversion will take longer than you anticipate. Give yourself time to set it up and play with it. You may have to hire a third-party resource to get things set up correctly and to make full use of the software. Hire a professional implementation firm. You get the idea. Interesting thing number 3, 7% of people who were switching from a spreadsheet to a PM, 7% of them ended up going back to the spreadsheet. These are people that, uh, that went to ClickUp, Financial Sense, Carbon Campy, like go down the list, you name it. CCH Access. If you do not use a PM right now, it is not a foregone conclusion that if you make the jump, that it will necessarily work out. That being said, 7% going back, does that mean that you have a 93% chance of it working? That's still pretty good, right? Now, for context, this tool that we created that gives you like a tailored to your firm recommendation for what practice management system to use, we'll link that down in the description, but it's kind of a guided process of like, first tell me what you use right now and we'll tell you whether or not we recommend it. But then based on the service mix of your firm, based on the size of your firm, based on your growth ambitions, it will give you a single recommended platform with 2 potential alternatives. And many of the people that went through this shared, we don't use a practice management system. And these are definitely firms on the smaller side. They're either using something that they built themselves or something in a spreadsheet. But it is very interesting to me. There are some people that will just, they will use that spreadsheet. That is their ride or die. They can't be convinced to use anything else. Takeaway number 4. The highest retention platform in this dataset, and it's not even close. Interesting thing we can see in this data is how many people not only switched to a tool, but then ultimately switched to a different tool or went back to the previous tool. The stickiest tool here with an 88% retention rate, Double. It's the reason why we talk about like what a big impact Double is having on bookkeeping firms. This data absolutely backs it up. You better believe this data like very much informs the content we choose to make and our app recommendations and all that. But while it's not perfect, it's not 100% retention rate, and there is no such thing as something that works for everybody. That 88% retention rate is quite a good gap ahead of any other system here. Takeaway number 5: ClickUp is the most common non-accounting vertical tool that people use as their practice management system, but it is also a revolving door. It is the lowest retention tool here. With as many people leaving ClickUp as are going into it. And literally no other tool here, not even the stinkers like Practice CS and CCH Access, no other tool here has that much churn, that many people leaving. And we've talked about this before. In fact, I ran a CAS practice on ClickUp, a very fast-growing CAS practice. And what was attractive to me about it was just how freewheeling and open it was. Like, it is a feature nerd's dream. ClickUp, you can do pretty much anything with it. But as I was coming out of an era in our firm when we were on Practice CS and it was so restrictive, like, that flexibility looked very attractive, right? The trouble ended up being is that flexibility made it really hard to make these turnkey processes on rails. And so if I'm going to have a whole bunch of people in the system, I need my team to be able to navigate the system in a way that's not going to break stuff, where it doesn't require being an expert in the platform to know exactly what to look at and how to use it the right way, right? It just needs to walk them through a repeatable process. That is where I ran out of steam with ClickUp. That is a lot of what I'm seeing from folks here. And it's not even just a ClickUp thing. ClickUp is just the most common thing. A lot of folks, uh, Trello is probably the, the second most common. Some monday.com in here, some Notion folks as well. But interesting in the data, this is the only platform for whom there are as many people going to it as there are leaving. And that matters. That is important. I think it's even harder to make the case for generalist tools like that these days as more tools are getting deeper into accounting firm workflow. You know, take Financial Sense, for example. They're rolling like month-end close features built into the platform. Client Hub's been doing this for a while. Canopy just announced they're doing this as well. Karbonn has a deep integration with Ader, who they acquired last year, that does month-end close automation. Non-accounting tools like ClickUp, while you'll be able to get them for cheaper and they will have more features, the ceiling is lower in terms of what they can do specifically within our workflows because ClickUp is not going to build month-end close automation, that sort of thing, into, into the platform automatically, right? Insight number 6: firm size, as you may suspect, has a big impact on the, on the practice management system that folks are picking up. So big firms, PracticeCS and CCH AccessPractice, and these are, uh, 50+ employee firms, they are still the most common platforms. Of the more new age alternatives, in my data, I see the most people going to Karbonne. Closely behind that, I see people going to Canopy. At the other end of the spectrum, very small firms, this is the most distributed group where very small firms are using the highest number of different tools. But the leaders here right now are Keeper, TaxDome, Canopy, and Financial Sense. That is like 3-employee-and-less firms. Firms in the middle are sort of a mix of all the above. You got some Practice CS coming into there, TaxDome, Canopy, Keeper, Carbon, ClickUp, and Financial Sense fairly distributed across those. Big firms, look me in the eyes. There's a better way, brother. Please don't use the practice management system that your tax software provides. One of the things that actually got a bunch of callouts in this data is integrations and how they get sold on integrations. The tax vendors are notorious at this. Those integrations are not real. They really aren't. They're so rudimentary. They are just not that useful. Particularly when you compare that to like the vast amount of things that new practice management systems do, like net new things that are useful that old systems don't do. All right. Two more insights in the data here. So this last fall, we did a tour of 13 cities, hosted workshops for over 1,000 accounting firms, and I bumped into a lady at one of these events and she said, this week I have 4 new hires starting from this podcast sponsor, Cloud Accountant Staffing. To be clear, she didn't say in the context of that conversation, this episode's sponsor. She just said Cloud Accountant Staffing. 4 people starting at the same— can you imagine? I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But you know what? Cloud Accountant Staffing makes it possible. Uh, back in my firm, we hired both onshore folks and offshore folks, try to get the best of both worlds because there's problems to just doing one or the other. Cloud Accountant Staffing, they're gonna help hold your hand through this stuff. It's actually founded by a former accounting firm owner. And so all the questions around, what about security? What about IT? What about, do I have to disclose this to my clients? They can help walk you through all that stuff. And one of the coolest new things I've seen in staffing recently, they launched a portal where you can see all of the candidates they've already pre-vetted. And even from that portal, you can book an interview. You literally just have to give them your email address, and you get access to the portal. You can see the tax talent, the accounting talent, the executive assistants, all these folks they've sourced. They've done like some personality assessments for them, and you can book an interview with these candidates directly from that portal. Super cool. If you're building out the squad for 2026, it's worth giving it a serious thought. That's Cloud Accountant Staffing. Learn more at the link down in the show notes. Tax firms are up to their eyeballs in 1040 work right now. You really are. Everybody is sending you all these documents and you're doing the old hokey pokey of like, ah, what do I need? What do I have? Uh, you never sent me number 3, 7, and 9. AI gang can automate honestly all of this at this point. This episode's sponsor, Sorban. They've been at the top of my recommendations for tax workflow since they launched, and they're using AI as effectively as anybody to take the pain out of 1040 work. And as you know, listening to this podcast, it has never been more important than it is right now to make sure that we are making the most of these unbelievably good new AI models. Your clients don't get value from the document gathering process. In fact, it gets away, away from like the, the stuff that you actually want to be doing, right? It, it devalues what you do if they see you as this just document sort of admin gatherer. Software has solved for this. It really, really has. To check out how Sorban is now using AI not only to automate 1040 intake, but also automate the input into your tax software and, and the delivery of the tax return. Check out the link down in the show notes. Super cool product. Number 7, a firm's growth ambitions actually has a big impact on the tool that they chose. So firms that were not really interested in growing and had no plans to grow, the leaders among those firms, Practice CS and AccessPractice, two of my laggard platforms. I don't really recommend anyone go to those platforms. We can see in the data and in the commentary, people are leaving these platforms in droves and never looking back. On the other end of the spectrum, the highest growth-minded firms, they're choosing Financial Sense, they're choosing Keeper. A surprising number of them are choosing ClickUp. I think the data skews a bit here because if you have a firm that has 5 people or under or 10 people or under, they're going to choose a tool that's suited for smaller firms, right? If you have a small firm, you're not buying a big firm tool when you're under 10 employees. Financial Sense, that their sweet spot is 20 people and under. Double, I might have said Keeper. Double's formerly known as Keeper. Keeper, I'd say, works across all sizes. It's just a very popular tool for anybody touching bookkeeping at all. Last, number 8, and this is so important. The most relevant advice comes from the people who have changed systems in the last few years. For example, people on Thomson Reuters Practice. 88% of the people on Practice got there over 5 years ago, but These people also shared insights on how to pick a practice management system. It is so important when you're taking advice from people to understand the context behind that advice. How much experience do they actually have? Like, have they changed systems? This comes up a lot in offshoring, something that's very easy to be opinionated about. And oftentimes the loudest people in the room who are against offshoring have never offshored. Similar with niching down or specializing in accounting firm. Most of the people that are anti-niching down have never niched down. Whereas the, the more interesting data set there would be, what if I could talk to 50 people that niched down? How many of them decided to then go away from that? How many of them are sticking with it? Because that person, they've done both, right? They've run a generalist firm, they've run a niche firm, they can see both sides of it. And so this data, we kind of have to work around the fact that there's a lot of people here that haven't changed systems in 5 or 10+ years who frankly like don't even know what a modern like practice management system ought to do for you, right? It shows up here in the data. It also ought to be a factor in whose advice you will take when you are going out in the wild and having these conversations. If you don't have people you can talk to about that, it's kind of the whole point of my online community. Realize we are closing in on 800 accounting firms that are in my private community. I can't tell you how many of these conversations are happening there every single day. Does this actually work? Tell me about this new feature. Anybody tried it yet? My gosh, is it going to save you a ton of time? And just cutting through the noise. Uh, website's rlz.io. Link for that's always down in the description as well. Up next, the future of compliance. Even if you don't identify as someone that does quote unquote compliance work, we all do to some degree, and all of our work is impacted by compliance. But how will our accounting firms change when AI completely rewrites how governments approach compliance? Let's get into that. It's Nerd Corner. Nerd Corner. Let's nerd it out. Nerd Corner. Welcome to Nerd Corner. This all came from a great question, fascinating question on AI's impact just on running a small business here. Big question for you. What do you think will happen when Congress and voters feel comfortable letting AI rewrite the tax code? It seems like a logical eventual result, doesn't it? So I would say more broadly, if AI changes compliance for entrepreneurs, which is a lot of things and not just tax, How does that impact accounting firms? I can tell you one really important lesson that I've learned traveling around the world, speaking and meeting accounting firms that do all sorts of different stuff. My background was in running a firm in the US, but accounting firms around the world, as you might imagine, look very, very different. But the one consistent thing you see is all accounting firms really operate around the compliance cadence of the country. So to give you an example, in the US, we have, uh, annual income tax reporting, and it is like this big onerous wildly complex thing, arguably the most complex income tax system in the world. So much revolves around that annual cycle, even though you have to make tax payments in throughout the year. The true-up, the reporting, it happens once a year. But if you go to Down Under— oh, I'm sorry, I did that— if you go to Australia, they have quarterly reporting requirements, not just quarterly tax payment requirements, but quarterly reporting requirements, meaning you are shipping off financial statements Big Brother. And this is why accounting firms and the relationship that an accountant has with the entrepreneur in Australia looks wildly different than it does in the US. A lot of US accountants have always pointed to Australia as like this progressive sort of more forward-looking model for how to run accounting firms. And a lot of, um, these sort of cool new age cloud software for accountants came up in that part of the world. And the reason is, is they're like annual cycle is fundamentally different than our own. Imagine if your client had to get a clean set of financial statements from you every 3 months. I mean, you know, if you do this once a year right now, you know what those books look like when they come to you in January. They got a, a whole lot of tidying up that needs to happen before you can send them off to the man. And so if a client's coming to you every 3 months to do this, I mean, you are having way more conversations with that client than if it's just happening once a year, which makes it vastly easier for you to be a more integrated part of their business and there to be more of this ongoing dialogue. So the frequency with which compliance happens, in my opinion, has a really big impact on how embedded an accountant is in the business. And I'm just talking about the default for a country, for a region. It's not to say that like in the US you can't be a super embedded person in the firm, but I'll say compliance forces sort of the default for how firms have to interact with a business. Now, the second big variable country to country is complexity, is how hairy that reporting is, how much goes into it. In the US, we like to make things as hard as they can possibly be and take great pride in that. Elsewhere in the world, they're trying to simplify things. Not to say we haven't tried that in the US, but the attempts have been pretty laughable. Cough, cough, postcard tax return. But in Australia, for example, imagine this, this is wild. In Australia, I can use zero to do my bookkeeping, to file my business taxes, and to do my payroll. Can you, like, US people, can you imagine getting all of those 3 things from the same, same platform? Bookkeeping, payroll, and filing your tax return? That is unthinkable. Like, the closest thing we have to that is QuickBooks Online, which will do your payroll and works fine until it doesn't, usually very spectacularly, and ends in A lot of really tense calls to support that sound something like, okay, well you have like $50,000 in deposits and I see that you're not paying them in. Are you gonna give me that money back or what's the plan here? And the support rep is like, we're not sure, but, uh, I don't know, we'll get back to you. And then eventually they just stop taking your calls. Like so many stories about that with QuickBooks Online payroll. But imagine that going even further to QuickBooks filing your income taxes. I mean, Intuit wants to do that, right? They wanna make that smooth little handoff from QuickBooks Online to, hey, here's a, here's a TurboTax person you can work with. But because in Australia you've got a more simplified sort of approach to reporting, software is handling much more of that process. But back to the original question, obviously AI is going to change how we work and how we get our stuff done. But what about when you let the politicians get their little hands on AI? Not as if they're like sitting there actually petting, you know, any of these things right now, but almost certainly AI changes what the rules actually look like, right? And I think If you want an example of this, look no further than how computers and software have arguably, at least in the US I would say, made all of the rules and the forms more complex. Like computers and automated calculation engines, like it gave them more permission to layer in more complexity because the computers could handle it. Whereas if it was still humans doing all this stuff by hand, there's no way that like it could be this complex, right? There's a US politician that famously included a letter with their tax return, which is just so quaint. Yes, it was Donald Rumsfeld. I'll just read you an excerpt of this because it's adorable. He attached this letter in 2014 to his 2013 tax return. He said, Dear sir or madam, I have sent in our federal income tax and gift returns for 2013. As in prior years, it is important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax return and tax payments are accurate. I say that despite the fact that I'm a college graduate and I try hard to make sure our tax returns are accurate. The tax code is so complex and the form so complicated that I know that I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested. And therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know whether or not their tax returns are accurate. As in past years, I've spent more money than I wanted to spend to hire an accounting firm to prepare our taxes, though I do believe they are well qualified. It goes on like this. Obviously, there's like a political angle to this, right? But it has some real like, Old man yells at cloud energy. But at the same time, like, we all agree, right? This is so impossibly complex. How did we get here? Will AI help? Will AI fix this? The answer has more layers than you may expect. So, interesting book. I've mentioned it before on the podcast. It's called The Lingle— Lingle, having a stroke, hang on. The Legal Singularity. It is co-written by the guy that founded BlueJay Tax, now a very big AI tax research platform. He is a law professor and he wrote this book with another law professor. Few years earlier, they had written another book around AI and law that like won a bunch of awards. And so these were at the time, they were sort of respected thought leaders within the space. In, in kind of this generative AI era, they wrote The Legal Singularity. And one of the things that they say is kind of a core component of the book is they think that law in general will get exponentially more complex in order to make it more fair and complete. So the law itself gets massively bigger to kind of COVID more edge cases because they think that's ultimately a more fair legal system if it is just bigger. And if we're relying on humans and, you know, traditional research tools and all of that to apply the law, then it can stand to reason that law can kind of only be so complex, right? Like, I mean, you just think about the judicial process right now and like how long it takes a thing to go through the courts and just how involved that is. I think we can all agree that's, that's not an efficient system, right? So I, I would argue that, you know, the, the complication of our tax system right now, that is evidence in favor of what they are suggesting. The notion that the more horsepower you got, the better the computers, the smarter the computers, the harder the, the stuff that we can throw at the computer. And so with more capability becomes more complexity. Now, a counterargument here is you mean to tell me that like, law will be 100 times the size it is right now. And this is going to be passed by politicians, the same politicians that like can't even keep the government open right now. How are they going to pass like a way bigger volume of rules? I think there's some validity to this argument. I also think that you could argue right now, like, I mean, Congress isn't really writing the rules right now. When there's an 800-page bill, I think we all know like what percentage of people even read the whole thing. So already they kind of, Congress like defines the broad brushstrokes and then you've got this whole sort of administrative apparatus around the actual creation of the rules. And that's far from perfect, right? Stuff breaks there oftentimes, they get things wrong. But in a world where there is 1,000 times as many words in the tax code, the process probably still looks the same. It is politicians making broad brushstrokes and a much bigger or an AI-assisted apparatus building out the actual rules. So in the book, the tie-ins they make to tax specifically, they say, one, AI will improve dispute resolution. So you think about having tax resolution issues with an agency. AI will give greater access to everyone, which that is, that's a win because right now, good help, if you got the tax man coming after you, it is expensive. And many of the people that have the tax man coming after you, they don't have the money to spend on really good help. So AI, in all likelihood, in fact, I would argue it's already doing this. It improves access to dispute resolution because 5 years ago you would not have been able to go to a tool and get like a pretty decent first pass at a response to say a tax notice. Like tax pros right now, you're not just gonna YOLO it and chuck it into say, you know, Claude or something like that and run with the letter it gives back. But that letter that it gives back is vastly better than what normies, non-professionals, could have put together themselves. So I'd argue AI is already improving access to dispute resolution. Second point in the book around the tax code is just that tax law becomes much more complete. There is more of it and it covers more of those edge cases. The upside then being number 3, that most questions and conflicts then can have like a near-instant resolution. If there's a very specific rule to the scenario, And if we have very good AI that can apply that stuff quickly, then in all likelihood, a lot of these big, complex, hairy things can be more rules-based than judgment-based. There's an argument here that like the larger the tax code is, the more guidance there is, the more the entire system becomes a humongous set of rules rather than sort of like a more simplistic set of rules where you then have to use judgment to kind of read between the lines. This is the case that they make in the book. We'll put a link to the book in the show notes. I think that's a pretty reasonable argument myself. We do have examples of just things getting more complex as the capabilities of computers, like, grow. But where does that leave us? What does that, what does that do to us? If anybody can get instant answers and can have at their fingertips a very good, very serviceable advisor, then what becomes the job of an accounting firm? Like, after all, like, it's worth thinking about why people engage accounting firms. We just heard from Donald Rumsfeld, on how he spent more money than he'd like to hiring an accounting firm. It's that time of year. It really is when your tax hosting provider absolutely grinds to a halt because everybody's in there hammering on the tax software at the same time and the hosting servers are like, I need a break right now. There's— gang, there's a better approach. That approach is today's sponsor, Barido, who will give you your own private cloud. You don't want to share a cloud with whatever other weirdos are hosting their software in your cloud with you, right? No, I don't know what that guy's doing. You want your own cloud that never slows down. And would you believe me if I told you it is cheaper than you would believe to move to Verado from, say, your Thomson Reuters hosting, Drake hosting, something like that? It is both cheaper. It is faster. What? That's two things. Kind of a no-brainer. They can move you over a weekend and they can even handle all of your, like, outsourced IT support. Like function as your IT department. In fact, the cost to have Varido be your IT department and do all of your hosting is less than the cost of just Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Buddy, this one is a no-brainer. On the list of to-dos to knock out right after April 15th, buddy, you're going to want to talk to Varido. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Spring is here. It is spring cleaning season, the perfect time to clean out the dusty corners of your accounting firm and just get get rid of the stuff that you don't want to be doing still. And for most of us, one of those cobweb-laden services that is just stuffed into the corner of the garage, it is bill pay. Well, good news, my friends, artificial intelligence is here to help. You might have heard of it, the platform that's crushing it right now, this video's sponsor, MakersHub. Listen, nobody likes bill pay, okay? It sucks, but almost every business has to do it, and oftentimes it's high It's messy. It impacts inventory. You're going after like savings. The details matter. You miss a zero or a comma here or there. Oh my, oh my, oh my gosh. That's a big deal on bill pay, right? We are getting wildly good new AI models seemingly by the week right now. And honestly, MakerSub are the folks that I trust to like put this work. MakerSub have been like arguably making the best use of AI models. Over the last 3 years to solve a very, very specific problem. The problem of BillPay. Nobody likes it. So if you do this stuff for your clients or you have clients who deal with project tracking, receiving, construction people, manufacturing folk, HVACs, super recommend you check out Maker's Hub. A great example of AI done well. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Tax. Tax is a grudge buy. Tax is not something that anybody sits up in bed one morning and goes, oh, you know what I want to do today, honey? Go find a tax account. No, like people do that because they have to. Interestingly, this was an interesting learning I had being kind of a tax pro that then launched a bookkeeping practice. CAS or bookkeeping work is much less of a grudge buy actually. There's, in my experience, there was a totally different level of appreciation from the client when I did their entire accounting department, kind of accounting department in a box, than there was when we did tax work. When we did their whole accounting department, they were like, oh brother, this is my least favorite part of my job. Thank you for taking this off my hands. When I did their tax work, they're like, you're fine, but I still hate that this exists and all you ever do is deliver me bad news. And so like grudge buys, people will only make that purchase as long as they have to. Like they are not excited about cutting you a check to do something that they wish didn't have to be done. And so I, I think it's a, a dangerous position to take to say, well, the human will always be needed for X, Y, Z, this technical thing. Like we're moving very closely to an era where the computers, they do the technical thing and it's our job to do everything else around it. Like that is a wedge that is just getting smaller and smaller by the day. And even if you try to set up camp there, the notion that you can still do this technical thing better than AI long-term, What are you actually doing in the end? In the end, you're going to be using AI and then layering your expertise on top of that. And so there is no world where like the humans win, where we're all smarter than AI and we just keep doing it all ourselves manually. It is more a question of what do consumer AI tools look like and what do professional AI tools look like? Does a professional AI tool plus a professional look much more compelling than just a consumer tool that anybody can rock up and use? My take here is that we need to be thinking really hard about what are the things in our lives that we still want a human to be involved in. There's a lot of things right now that AI is capable of that I don't want to use an AI for. Like, would you go to a movie theater tomorrow if someone said, great news, yesterday we just generated a 2-hour AI movie and it'll be available in theaters tomorrow? Like, it's a movie. Right? Like you could go and it might be all right and have sort of a somewhat cohesive storyline, but that doesn't make it interesting. Like, I don't, I don't think I would want to actually go and see that. We gotta, we gotta stop pretending that AI is not replacing stuff. It is. Look around at all sorts of industries. Folks are actively being replaced by AI. And to like, for anyone to say AI will never do X, Y, Z, I think we're oftentimes saying that out loud to comfort ourselves. Which if anything placates us into not taking action, right? Like it's giving you permission to maybe not pay attention or not learn or not do the hard thinking around it. But there are many aspects of what we do that I would argue that I don't think someone wants to trust to a computer. Now, to be clear, there are tons of things that we do today that will go away that can simply be done by a computer. And so that like what we do for people, I think it is very quickly going to look very different. But like to borrow an analogy, another analogy from Hollywood, so many people were like, man, I want to be a filmmaker growing up. And if they can like get into Hollywood and get a job as say a video editor, you will go into this, this dark room of other editors and just do hours upon hours upon weeks of grunt work, going through footage, cutting stuff. And it is not sexy at all. And people will go and they will sink years into this. For the chance of potentially, you know, getting noticed or, or being able to go on to this more exciting role. But what got people there was their love for filmmaking. And what they ended up doing was tedium, was just this brutal work. And that is, I think, a lot of what is going away right now is, is the brutality. And to be clear, that person that's sitting in a dark room, when AI can do that thing, yes, they lose their job. But is that job the thing that set them on that path? Was anyone set on the path of accounting because they enjoyed seeing a number in a W-2 box and then entering it into some tax software? The answer for most people is no. Now, there are some people who love sort of the OCD-ness of accounting, and there are aspects of the work that they love. But at the end of the day, AI doesn't care if you like that job or not. AI will for sure take care of a lot of the stuff we don't enjoy doing— the tedium. but that is not a factor in whether or not AI can ultimately do it, right? And so we do have to be careful if we are like, well, I wanna do X, Y, and Z. We still have to pay attention to kind of the greater ecosystem, what's happening. And if Y can be automated by AI, just know that like, if you're gonna spend time on Y, I mean, like, nobody's gonna pay you for that. Like, this is, that's like the business version of knitting. Where are we going here? I know you're spending a lot of time on it. At least with knitting, the outcome is like something itchy that you can give to someone that they'll never use. Oh, we just made a lot of people mad. You know what I mean though? As soon as AI can do that thing, you're not going to set up your business to like be in the business of doing a thing that AI can do. So for sure, this shrinks the room we have for back-of-house accountants, folks that just want to sit there and be the number crunchers. There's probably fewer of those. It probably makes it more important when you're hiring accountants. To like score the vibe check. Like, can you have a conversation with them? Can you make small talk? Are they curious? Will they take an interest in you? Because that's a signal that they can take an interest in your clients and, and have a conversation. I was on a webinar recently. Matthew May was there who, uh, was, he was at Acuity for a long time. Now he's been part of kind of this bigger roll-up of a bunch of firms. But he said one thing they're implementing is basically kind of these mandatory touchpoints, like to just Force conversations with clients because it's really easy to slip into this production mindset where you just ship the stuff off every single month. You never actually have a conversation, but the opportunities that we can enable for them almost all come from just talking and making the time and space to have those conversations. We're heading into hosting 20 live events in the United States for accounting firms, and we're gonna have about 100 people out at each city. None of those people sitting in that room, hanging out, making new connections, are like, I wish an AI agent could have done this for me. It's, I mean, it's an incredibly fun, like, half day. You're meeting a lot of other smart people. You're getting a load of ideas from them. What we have to be thinking about as accounting firms is how do I be the person that comes alongside the entrepreneur to support them in whatever that looks like in an era when the computer is doing a lot more of the work? And the hard thing, the scary thing for people right now is we may not know exactly what that looks like yet. Like what does it look like to advise in a compliance environment when AI is doing most of the compliance? What remains? What's still there? Almost certainly there are still going to be ways that we can help people run their businesses better when so much of the tedium and the actual grunt work has gone away, particularly in an environment where there's vastly fewer accountants than we need to get the work done as the sort of status quo process looks like. Where the risk is is the people who love the process, who love the doing, and are so in love with the doing, maybe that's what got them into accounting in the first place, that the notion of AI replacing that doing is, is scary to them because maybe that is where their identity is staked right now, is in classifying transactions, is in putting together workpaper files. And it, it is those folks where this is the most dangerous. There will probably always be some back-of-house accountant role, right? But I think we can probably all agree that stuff's shrinking. If you haven't seen it yet, if you want something that's like a very real proof of this to me, check out our Cowork video that we put out on the YouTube main channel. It's not a tool that I would yet trust with sensitive client information, but we ran a whole bunch of example, like dummy data examples through it from bookkeeping files small and large to tax projects small and large. AI is good enough to do so much of this stuff already. It's like the security's actually lagging behind the capability of the models. It's happening, man. And I'll be honest, I don't know a single accountant yet that's lost their job due to AI. And so that doesn't feel close or particularly scary yet, but we all gotta be paying attention, right? And I do think the most informed people in the profession are the ones tuning into this podcast. We're not really speculating about AI, but like talking about more the practical, where the rubber's meeting the road. We just opened this podcast episode with data from over 700 accounting firms about actual tech selections. Like, that's what I'm interested in. What's actually working for people? Where's this stuff being deployed? And having conversations about what the future looks like given the stuff that's actually happening. Not that, not the headlines that we're getting from software companies, but what's actually happening in real accounting firms. If you are building an accounting team, you know just what a headache it is to get all of your team doing month-end closes the same way, right? There's that stage where you're all in the same room and you can kind of like keep in sync because it's such a small team. But beyond a certain threshold, you're like, oh my gosh, everybody's choosing their own adventure. These engagements are taking on lives of their own. And it is what makes the latest feature drops from this episode's sponsor, Financial Sense, ever so important. So they are historically a practice management system for accounting firms. That is Financial Sense. But they're shipping a bunch of month-end close automation features inside of Financial Sense. So it has actually a deep integration into to the accounting ledger, and it is pulling all the transactions into the platform to review, like, were there any weird outlier transactions? Like, it actually goes through, like, remember what it was, like 6 to 10 different categories of things that could be wrong, and it's identifying those transactions for you in an automated way. And if there's an issue, you can fix it right from within Financial Sense, and it will push that fix back to the accounting ledger. They also do the same with uncategorized transactions. So if you're doing the, uh, Amazon purchase hokey pokey with a client and you're like, hey, what is this? Can you gimme a receipt? You can manage all of that from inside Financial Sense as well, giving you sort of like a single place that is everything that you need to run your bookkeeping practice. Some really cool stuff that they've been shipping, and I've got a special discount code that you can use. If you are a firm with 2 or more users, use the code JASON10 to get 10% off the annual team or scale plan. Worth checking out. I think you'll like it. To learn more, check out the link. So this is a true story. 7 years ago, I'm talking with, this gal that runs an accounting firm, and she's very progressive in many ways, and she's kind of just showing me her model for how she does a number of different things. And then it just comes up as an afterthought that, oh yeah, most of my staff is offshore. And I'm like, what did you just say? You're— the people that are doing your work are not even in the country? And she's like, well, some of them are, but a lot of them doing the heavy lifting are offshore. She said these folks are easier to find than onshore hires. They are just as productive, if not more. And they are half to a quarter the cost. And I was like, but America and disclosures and all these things, right? And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I respected for whom this was the norm that I was like, okay, maybe I gotta reassess kind of our position on all this stuff. Now, thankfully these days we have groups that help accounting firms with this, that have done this with loads of firms. Today's sponsor, TeamUp, they will help you do this for the first time if you if you've never done it before. TeamUp's actually run by a former bookkeeping firm owner who just had a hard time finding good accounting talent offshore. So they went out, they hired a bunch of recruiters in the Philippines, and they pull in the very best people. By the way, I mean, all the top 100 are investing in the Philippines. Like, there's a tremendous amount of accounting talent in the Philippines. And so they're pulling in bookkeepers, tax folks, executive assistants, whatever you need. And TeamUp specifically has a direct hiring model, which means all you do is you pay TeamUp one time a recruiting fee to go and find you your next dream hire. It's, it's as simple as that. But if you haven't done it before, you're gonna have all sorts of questions and blockers and all that, right? Don't just sit with that stuff. Talk with TeamUp because they've helped a load of firms navigate these exact same questions. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out a link down in the show notes. With that, we gotta get to the mailbag, man. Rounding up a whole bunch of questions around growth and pricing. that has clients moving to new firms. And so like kind of by definition, it's not a great source of specificity, right? The reality of how most accounting firms get into a niche or into some sort of specialization is it usually happens like completely by accident. And when you're first starting out a firm as, as these folks are, by the way, going into business with your wife, Godspeed, brother, a lot of courage. My wife, you want, you wanna know what's going on in my household today? I am grieving, okay? Because we just lost— I mean, someone who's been a pretty essential member of our family for the last 3 years. Um, that 2025 Honda Odyssey, Honda Odyssey Sport, who has been with us through a lot. So many big family trips, big life changes. Arguably the most stable, most consistent thing in our family's little universe. It was the van. But I'm super sad to share that time has come to an end. Wasn't my choice. Wasn't the kids' choice. We're all pretty upset. Was the old ball and chains choice. And I've said before, I've been happily married for over a decade. My marriage is great. It's not perfect. No marriage is, right? It's not perfect. It's not golf bad, but it's pretty good. But to run a bookkeeping firm with my wife, good, good for you. I'm happy for you. That's actually a surprising trend in like the live workshops that we run. How many husband-wife, like, How many partner combos come out and work on it together? Super cool. I joke, not about the van. I am in a dark place today. What were we talking about? Most accounting firms, they stumble into specializations like completely by accident. They find this really valuable problem that they can solve and they're like, oh geez, it would actually be a pretty killer business if we just worked all day on solving this problem for people. Uh, example of my firm, we started doing some stuff with dentists and we're like, ah, it's fine. Like dental, like Bookkeeping, very easy, cash basis. They have money to pay. But then we learn about DSOs, good old private equity making everything better, right? Well, they're rolling up a bunch of dental practices and you get a whole bunch of dentists that are like, hey, we should all group up because this guy said that we're going to get better EBITDA multiple if we do. It doesn't, doesn't end well. But you get 20 docs and they're like, okay, who wants to do the accounting? Eeny meeny miny nobody. And we could come in and we'd be like, hey, we've done this before. We know, in fact, we do this for DSOs. We'll come in, we take a percentage of collections. We will run the back office for you because you all should be chairside. You should be focused on production. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, cool. They'll do it so we don't have to. When something breaks, we can blame them. I like, it's not, it's one less thing for all the docs to fight about. And we became the experts there. And where, you know, a dental clinic could be an $800 to, you know, $3,000 a month engagement. DSOs for us were, uh, you know, $10 grand to $60 grand a month. And at no point in that journey did anybody sit up in bed in the morning and think, you know what I'm gonna do is build a plan for how we can help PE take down dentistry by powering their back office. No, like we, it was like little baby step stuff, baby stepped into dental, baby stepped into DSO. Now I don't know if that means that's the right way to approach it, but at least in the early stages of your firm, depending on the financial situation that you're in, if you need the money, like start wide. If those are the folks that are coming in the door, like take the money. Now there are other folks who will start narrow, and I do think you can grow just as quickly by starting narrow as starting wide. Many people have that thing where they're like, I'm pretty sure I could do this. And if you have that, follow it, because the worst thing is having that unresolved, I think I could do this. What's better is knowing, can you actually do it or not? Like, follow that through, man. It might work. It might not work. Don't put too much pressure on yourself getting this thing right the first time because you almost certainly won't. The more important thing is that you build the skill of learning how to specialize a business around a specific need. That is something that's repeatable. You will find other needs in other industries. More important than guessing right correctly the first time is, is you like building that ability, that skill, being able to identify the next opportunity. So if there's nothing staring you in the face right now and you just gotta pay the bills, take what comes in the door, but be really looking out closely for rare, expensive pains. You want them to be rare because you don't want the person across the street to undercut your price. You want them to be expensive because if my solution saves them $100 grand, I can charge them pretty good money, right? So it makes it really hard to serve companies that don't have much money. That's why it's hard to, you know, niche into restaurants, local restaurants, a very hard business, not super profitable. The folks that I know that are niching into restaurants are working with like, you know, larger chains, multi-location, slightly more corporate setups. But the one guy that's running his restaurant, for sure, if you're passionate about that and wanna support those folks, go wild. But in the words of modern philosopher Alex Hormozi, rich people problems pay better than poor people problems. And that's a really crappy thing to say, but it is true. The more expensive the pain you're solving, the just the greater the fee you can you can command, right? So look for rare pains, look for expensive pains, and they're not gonna be easy to find. If they were, everyone else would've already built around 'em, right? Next up on pricing, I'm 4 years in with my part-time practice and still think my effective rate of $100 an hour is quote unquote good money, as you mentioned. Makes me wanna raise the minimum from $375 to $775. Brother, we all have our own version of this, and you mentioned 4-year part-time practice. A sidebar on that, a lot of people do this side hustle thing sort of indefinitely. It's so hard to be good at anything in life, but just know the more things you're trying to do, the worse you're going to be at every single one of them. If you got to make the jump, make the jump, man. If you, if you want to find other people making the jump, Logan Graf runs a great community for this called Counter. I think the website's counter.community. That's a whole bunch of people starting a firm. You surround yourself with other people doing the same thing and you'll have an entirely different level of confidence to, uh, just execute on it. It's like anything else in life where you're like, oh, I can never do that. And then you see the people who are actually doing it and you're like, well, if they can do it. Like maybe the greatest lesson someone can learn coming up in an accounting firm is you all day you get to talk with successful entrepreneurs, which is super cool because these people are so rare in the wild. Right. But the thing you learn very quickly is that guy's making a lot of money and he's an idiot. What am I doing preparing tax returns? I need to be recycling milk jugs like that guy. Anyways, $100 an hour feels like good money. But even if, even if like $500 an hour felt like good money to you, The thing is, it's always changing. It's always evolving. You're always growing, as it should be. Like, there should never be a point in running your firm where you don't look backwards 18 months and be like, boy, we were just giving it away back then, weren't we? Like, you should, you should always be growing. That's what we want, right? If you yourself pride yourself in getting better and learning more things and continuing to grow, then your fees, your client list, like, that ought to evolve with you, right? Otherwise, if not, And this is a really hard thing is like that client list, it starts here, but then you keep adding people, but then all these people, they stay indefinitely. And then you have this like increasing level of begrudging, begrudging with these people down here. Cause you're like, man, they're not paying me very much. They kind of came in under a different whole paradigm, different universe. And then these people are like, don't you remember what we had? And so you feel like you gotta keep serving them. But the person that they want is the person that you used to be, not the person that you are anymore. And so you are stuck between the person you're trying to become and the person that they want you to be. Meanwhile, you've got this client up here who's like, hey, I'm happy to cut you a really big check because I'm actually really excited about how you're helping us. And if there's one client like that, you know there's 100 more. And so this business up here is a vastly better, much more interesting business to run. The trouble is we're paralyzed by these guys, version 1.0 of your firm. And for some people, they can never give themselves permission to graduate from that. And I don't know, usually that's wrapped up in like, I'm always going to be that person. I'm not going to lose sight of my roots. I have to help those people. I'm helping the community. For me, I don't think that's real because there's probably another accounting firm that could even do a better job for those folks. A firm for whom those would be A clients, right? Maybe somebody else that's earlier on in their journey. And then you, I want to see you grow into like the next version 2 Snowflake. How can you become something more? Because you won't, as long as you are anchored in that thing that you're not excited to do anymore. Right? And so, so much of this is between the ears. Am I worth $100 an hour? Jeepers. If I could see myself, you know, 7 years ago, that guy, he'd been like, wow, you are incredibly entitled. And you may even have those people in your life who want you to be the person you were 7 years ago, right? Like the person who will be like, you've changed. And that like hurts. I can tell you I learned there were people in my life who were that way, who didn't want me to grow. People who kind of wanted to keep me under their thumb and like maintain this superiority or something. Like, those are not people that are rooting for me. And sometimes the really hard thing is removing those people from your life when they're not in service of like the person they're trying to become. Because who am I getting up every day for? Not that person, right? Thanks for tuning into Jason on Philosophy. Daniel Luna, Anthropic. Partnered with Intuit. What do you think? Anthropic's the company behind Claude, behind Cowork. Intuit made a press release. This is, it doesn't mean anything. Whenever you see this sort of stuff of somebody partnering with an AI company, all it really does is they want a press release to be able to promote and go on the news and talk about and tell Jim Cramer like, oh, we're doing XYZ with this company. Out of it, they get a press release and then the AI company gets some sort of like hard number commitment. To say like, we're gonna spend X millions of dollars on tokens from this company over some time period. Intuit's done this basically every quarter with some AI company. They've done it with OpenAI a ton of times. Inside the organization, most of the time, like they're gonna build whatever AI gonna make the most sense for their user. These partnerships are really just like, how do we get some press? Maybe they're getting like discounted access to stuff. But I can promise you, Intuit has already been using Claude's models. The marketing team just wanted to have something to talk about. This question, we kind of talked about this a bit earlier. I'm worried about AI taking away some aspects of my work that I enjoy, but I'm excited for it to take away the parts of my job that I don't enjoy. Can we just use AI for those bits? I think this is relatable for a lot of accountants where you have that thing that just scratches some sort of itch, almost like the old QuickBooks Desktop sound on the register. We go through the transactions and it's like, boop, boop, boop, boop. There are two types of people in the world. One's for whom that was just the most satisfying thing. And then there's the other type of people, and I do not understand you. But a lot of folks have aspects of their job that they're like, this is so satisfying. I love doing it. It just scratches some sort of itch, like this OCD thing. I enjoy it. And so oftentimes we make people feel better about what's happening because we say, well, AI will do the parts of our job that we don't like. Isn't that great news? Huzzah! No, AI doesn't care about whether you like doing that thing or not. AI is going to kick down the door and gobble up whatever it can in the name of capitalism, whether you want it to do that task or not. Now, some things require taste. Can AI make a 90-minute video right now? Sure can. Doesn't mean I want to plop down in a movie theater and watch it. And so the more of the things that we talk about is advisory within accounting firms, how we come alongside clients and pretty much just talk. And work through things with them. A lot of those things, people don't really have much of an appetite to do that with AI, at least not the same version of it that you would do with a human. And so some things that require taste, I do still think we prefer the humans to deliver that to us. But let's be super clear. If you enjoy making rugs by hand, but there are machines that can churn out 10,000 rugs for every one rug that you make, if you're going to keep making that rug, that rug better absolutely slap. You gotta give somebody a reason to like buy that rug over any other rug. Like, is it an amazing design? Is it the only rug that works in space? Does it have pockets that do a very specific job that you need done by a rug? Choosing to set up camp in a place where AI can come and do this work just because you like doing that work, I would love to make you feel good about that and say your future's safe, but it isn't. I feel like this episode's been too doomer. It is a fine line. Honestly, it's a very fine line between like being a doomer and being a realist. I think more folks are becoming realists with like what we're seeing from Cowork and just how far along AI is getting. But you know what? I'm still here. You're still here. And it feels like that changing is still a ways off. Also, is there maybe a timeline where we do work a little less? Where we're outside playing more pickleball? What if it took some work off our plate? This was a good comment on the subject of AI security. Specifically for US firms, tax firms wading into 7216 stuff. It's a little bit nerdy, so I'll keep it quick. Here's the comment. I agree with Jason Staats. This is Brandon Lehrman. I agree with Jason Staats that the idea of putting tax return information into LLMs automatically triggering 7216, that whole argument falls apart pretty quickly. There may absolutely be cases where 7216 is required. 7216 consent is required, but LLMs automatically triggering it is not a clean rule. It's a selective one. The argument some folks are making seems to be that if software analyzes tax return information or if the data touches a platform that may not store and process everything onshore 100% of the time, then boom, 7216 consent is required. But if that's the rule, that's not an AI problem. That is an almost the entire modern software stack problem. He said software like HalistaPlan analyzes tax return information. Google Workspace's standard business tiers do not guarantee that everything is stored onshore. And if the answer then to that is no, we actually do need 7216 consent for all of that, then fine. That's at least a consistent position. But let's be honest, if we're going down that path, it is more of an admission that a lot of firms have already been cruising at 30,000 feet without making a bunch of disclosures that maybe we were required to make. 7216 is wildly out of date. I mean, there's a dangerous path here where you start convincing yourself then that it's like, well, 7216 is so out of date, we don't even need to comply with it. We do still need to comply with it. The important through line here, I think, is the AI of it all really doesn't matter to me. AI, I mean, they're closed systems for sure. They can retain your data and train models with it if they're allowed to, like most consumer tools do. But business AI by and large doesn't do that. And so simply being an AI tool to me, at least these days, really shouldn't impact the determination of whether this requires a 7216. Consent from the client or not. Non-US listeners right now just hammering the skip forward button. On the subject of, uh, Claude Cowork, T-Side said, this is good general advice. Biggest point of caution here is outside of the data security issues, you simply cannot fully rely on Claude or any AI for professional analysis and output. It can help you, but you have to know what you're doing and when it's wrong. There's a real risk of AI making people think they're capable of things they're not capable of. Like, that, that's probably what like we are just going to get glazed into a wildly higher level of confidence than maybe we ought to have. Like, that's kind of the downside take. It's also like tremendously good. I mean, does it get stuff wrong? Yes. But holy smokes, is it smarter than any software we've ever had just by light years? But yes, to the point here, you can't just blindly trust the output, which I actually think is why accounting firms are so suited for AI adoption. As accountants, we've never trusted anyone. Man, like, what intern have you ever hired that's given you anything that went out the door, right? So plugging AI into that when we already have a quality assurance process that remains the same whether AI was used or not, like, doesn't that make accounting firms a great place then to deploy AI? I say yes. Two more questions. Concrete Numbers says, Jason, you never talk about TaxGPT or Juno. I hear TaxGPT is coming out with their own OpenClass sort of AI agent that can prep tax returns, but it hasn't been fully rolled out yet. They're just promoting a waitlist at this point. Juno is, I believe, $30 a return. It's AI and handles the input of W-2s, 1099s, and imports that stuff into tax software. It would be good if you reviewed these apps at this point. Here's the thing, all these apps are in my app recommendations and I share my thoughts about them there, but I don't recommend either of these apps that you're mentioning. It, it's funny though, at least the way I talk about software companies now, the companies I get the most questions about are the ones that I don't recommend. And it's because I choose to talk about the stuff that I do recommend because I don't think I should go out of my way to talk about the stuff that isn't there yet. The stuff that I hear from people, they're like, it just, it's not working for me or it's not as good as this other tool. I know the founders behind both of these companies. I know what they're working on. I often have to know about stuff before it's even released. So I would say like if you ever have a tool and you're like, well, why isn't Jason talking about this? Go check my app recommendations. It's almost certainly there somewhere. It just may not be recommended yet. I mean, I can't tell you how many founders want me to promote their stuff and want me to talk about their stuff. So like just about anything that's out there, it's on my radar, but I'm just not going to go out of my way to talk about stuff that's not ready yet, right? That doesn't help anybody. Most of those folks usually go into my watching category, which means they're doing cool new stuff, but like they're not in a spot where I'd be like, go out and buy this. But that's where every single software company starts. That being said, we do try to get these people eyeballs. You know, this TaxGPT release you just talked about is in the newsletter that went out yesterday. Are you on my weekly newsletter? Jasononfirms.com/newsletter. It's kind of like the biggest, like, roundup of cool news that you need to see. But yeah, in this case, it's just because these platforms at this stage, I'm not recommending. Last question, more of a statement, is that it feels like we're moving from people doing work to people reviewing work to people designing systems to do the work. Yeah, I think the coolest framing I've seen of this all, this change, is moving from the age of how to do to the age of what to do. So if you think about bookkeeping, if you think about a tax return, historically, the skill that it took to get to a completed work product like that required schooling, that required years of experience to get to a correct work product in the end. But you can see a not too distant future where getting to a correct tax return or correct month-end close, it's at least more accessible at a cheaper price, right? Even, even if you still think, no, you still need the expert, the big brain person to make it just so, that might be the case for some scenarios, but for the very simple scenarios, we're pretty close to like a virtually free AI tool being able to do it plenty good. And so when it can be done by anyone, what matters next is then thinking more about, well, what's actually worth doing? To go back to the example of AI right now can make a 90-minute video. That doesn't mean I want to go sit in the movie theater and watch it. And so the execution of a plan, it's getting trivialized for sure. But the fact that we can make slop doesn't make slop valuable. And so you're going to have accounting slop, you're going to have tax return slop, people doing all these different things, software companies cropping up around serving this problem and serving that problem because it's now trivial to do so. But that doesn't mean it ought to be done or is worth doing. And so it becomes more about the decision-making of does it make sense to go down this path? It might be very easy to do so, but that doesn't mean that it is worth doing. And that is where we sit in our overstuffed office chairs, stroking your beard, maybe the cat that is in your lap, as all of your AI agents serve you and you say, yes, my job is now to make important decisions. My agents will do my bidding and I will reserve all of my caloric expenditure just doing so, using my brain, thinking about things, and helping people to make decisions. That's probably the future. What you do, not how you do it. Now take my hand and let us go into this future together. Gang, appreciate you being here. You got any questions, thoughts, angry rants? Pop those bad boys down in the comments and I will see you. See you next time. Okay. See you there. Bye.